The Economic Costs of Alcohol Abuse

Another approach to assessing the burden of disease is to estimate the associated “cost of illness” (COI). Studies of COI provide a framework for expressing in dollar terms the multidimensional impact of a health problem. Typically, a COI study of a particular health problem includes estimates of the costs of health care services, losses in productivity from illness and premature death, and other expenditures and resource losses that can be attributed to the health condition. For many diseases, the COI estimates run well into the billions of dollars. Estimates for different diseases often are not directly comparable to one another, however, because of variations in methods, data sources, and underlying assumptions (National Institutes of Health 1997).